Employers, be very afraid (or be part of the solution)

Fellow ZDNet blogger, Richard Stiennon, posted an article yesterday called "Children, be very afraid." From my perspective, however, it's the employers who should be very afraid of this generation of children. Richard's post outlined research from Rochester Institute of Technology concerning the ways in which middle and high school students are involved in cybercrime. While the definition of cybercrime is quite broad in this research, the sheer numbers of students who are very adept at circumventing controls and safeguards on their technological lives is overwhelming.

As I've said before, if students spent as much time on their studies as they do creating (or at least using) proxies just to circumvent content filters, America's schools would be cranking out Harvard candidates left and right. This last statement doesn't even take into account all of the other ways that kids occupy their online time. As Stiennon notes, the research found:

anonymous email bomb threats, downloading of pornography to cell phones in the hallway, pirated movie downloads, credit card theft, etc. He surveyed 13,773 students in his computer crime and victimization survey...In the 7th-8th graders surveyed for instance: 21% have lied online about their age, 10% pretended to be someone else, 7% have circumvented security measures, 5% have used IT devices to cheat on school work.

These kids are all graduating and moving on to college and the workforce. As adults, will they be any less likely to circumvent corporate security measures? It's time for a partnership between secondary educators, colleges, and employers to find a solution for the iPod generation, one which allows them to be as connected as they expect, yet also be good corporate citizens. This isn't about "taking it from the man." Rather, it's about potential lost productivity and drastically increased amounts of support time required from IT staffs who now must turn their time to police work.

I'm not saying I have the solution. Unfortunately, so much of this echoes the problems with aging copyright laws. Times have changed and so has an entire generation of students and employees. Rules need to evolve, as well, but most importantly, we need to harness all of this connectedness and online savvy to increase productivity in the workplace. Anyone who's had success with public-private partnerships and/or the creation of responsibly-connected students (I think I just coined a phrase there), talk back below. Employers, feel free to chime in, too, with your problems, concerns, and success stories.